urn:taro:utexas.hrc.00552Roy Campbell:An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom CenterFinding aid created by Bob TaylorHarry Ransom Center, 2011Finding aid encoded by Katherine Mosley, 1
September 2011Finding aid written in English.The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom
CenterCampbell, Roy, 1901-1957Roy Campbell Collection1920-1987 (bulk 1942-1957)4 document boxes (1.68 linear feet), 1 galley file (gf) The Ransom Center's collection of Roy
Campbell spans the years 1920 to 1987 and includes drafts of poems, prose works, and
translations, as well as family and other correspondence. Also present are
biographical and bibliographical material, including published reviews and criticism
and a few photographs. English
Acquisition:

Roy Campbell was born at Durban, Natal, on October 2, 1901, to Dr. Samuel G. and
Margaret Campbell, the father African-born of Ulster Scots stock, the mother a Scot.
Roy grew up in the rough-hewn setting of colonial Natal, displaying an early
affinity for creative writing and an active outdoor life. Sent to Britain to attend
Oxford at the end of World War I, he failed his entrance exams, but defended himself
by explaining to his father that university lectures
interfere very much with my work.

Campbell plunged into a bohemian literary life, acquiring literary friends including
William Walton, the Sitwells, and Wyndham Lewis. He met and married (in 1922) Mary
Margaret Garman, a young beauty no less independent-minded than himself; they soon
became the parents of daughters Teresa (Tess) and Anna. His first substantial work,
a poem entitled

The Flaming Terrapin, was written in
the loft of a Welsh cowshed early in the couple's marriage and published in 1924.

In 1925, Campbell returned to Durban to help found the journal

Voorslag as a vehicle to help rid southern Africa of what he saw as its
smug and parochial world view. This effort failed, and upon his return to England
Roy Campbell published The Wayzgoose, a South African
Satire. The Wayzgoose did little for
Campbell's reputation, but his following collection of poems, Adamastor, published by Faber, was well received critically.

By the end of the 1920s, Campbell's attitude toward Bloomsbury and the British
intelligentsia in general had grown increasingly critical, and in 1931, after
publishing

The Georgiad, an anti-Bloomsbury poetic
diatribe, Roy and Mary Campbell left England for the Mediterranean, settling first
in Provence and by 1935 in Spain, where they were received into the Catholic Church.

The Campbells were living in Toledo, Spain, when the Spanish Civil War erupted in the
summer of 1936, and Roy's witnessing the murder of Catholic priests and nuns at the
hands of militiamen of the Spanish Republic provoked the final break between Roy
Campbell and conventional British literary leftism. Campbell became ever more
outspoken on behalf of Francisco Franco and the cause of the rebelling Spanish
Nationalists, and in February 1939 published

Flowering
Rifle, a book-length poem filled with praise of Franco and condemnation of
the Spanish Republic.

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Campbell denounced Adolf Hitler and
Nazi Germany and returned with his family to Britain. After serving for a time as an
air raid warden Roy Campbell was able to enlist in the British army despite his age
and physical condition. A lengthy period spent shuttling between army camps in Wales
and Scotland finally ended when he was sent to East Africa in 1943, only to be
invalided out of the service in April 1944.

Campbell returned to England and worked as a government clerk before being offered
employment by the British Broadcasting Corporation at the end of the war. In the
late 1940s and into the 1950s, Campbell was a producer for the BBC before moving one
final time to Sintra, Portugal. While Campbell had found Franco's ties to Nazi
Germany in the late 1930s increasingly distasteful the authoritarian Salazar regime
ruling Portugal at mid-century was to him endurable.

In his final years Campbell turned more and more to literary translation, producing
English versions of

The Poems of St. John of the
Cross (1951), Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal
(1952), and two novels of Antonio d'Eça de Queiroz (Cousin Basilio in 1952, The City and the
Mountains in 1955). In 1951, he published his second volume of
autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse, later finding
time for a North American lecture tour in 1953 and a 1954 visit to South Africa to
receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Natal.

Roy Campbell died on April 23, 1957, in an automobile accident near Setúbal,
Portugal, while returning to Sintra from Toledo after attending Holy Week ceremonies
in Seville.

The Ransom Center's collection of Roy Campbell spans the years 1920 to 1987 and
includes drafts of poems, prose works, and translations, as well as family and other
correspondence. Also present are biographical and bibliographical material,
including published reviews and criticism and a few photographs. The collection is
based on acquisitions from the collections of T. E. Hanley and Ellsworth and Joan
Mason, along with portions of the papers of Uys Krige and the Campbell family. The
collection, as arranged at the Ransom Center, is in three series: I. Works,
1931-1957 (2 boxes); II. Correspondence, 1920-1987 (1 box); and III. Biographical
and Critical Materials, 1933-1979 (1 box).

The Works series contains, in the main, projects Roy Campbell worked on the last half
decade of his life while living in Sintra, Portugal. Translations of Horace's

Ars Poetica and Federico García Lorca's La Casa de Bernarda Alba--neither yet published--are
found here, along with Campbell's published versions of The
Poems of St. John of the Cross and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. A partial manuscript of the critical work Lorca, along with the unpublished Taurine Epistles are
also present.

Drafts--often multiple drafts--of poems written in Campbells's years in Portugal are
primarily contained in the 35 exercise books found under the headings Manuscript notebooks and Notebooks. Of this group, only manuscript notebook 30 appears to date
from the years before the Second World War.

The largest part of the Correspondence series is Roy Campbell's letters to his wife.
The earliest piece of this correspondence dates from 1924, but the bulk of the
letters were written during the war years when Campbell was stationed at various
army camps in Great Britain and later in East Africa. There are also smaller groups
addressed to Campbell's mother and to his eldest daughter Teresa.

Literary correspondence is not prominent in the collection, but letters written by
Wyndham Lewis, Alan Paton, and Edith Sitwell are found in Campbell's incoming
correspondence and in the Third Party correspondence. The Third Party correspondence
also includes letters between Teresa Campbell and Ellsworth Mason dealing with the
sale of materials relating to Roy Campbell. The Campbell-Mason correspondence also
includes biographical notes on the Campbell family supplied by Teresa, her sister
Anna, and Anna's husband Rob Lyle.

The Bibliographical and Critical Materials series is dominated by several drafts of
articles about Roy Campbell written by his friend Uys Krige between the early 1930s
and 1958. The earliest of these date from Krige's first meeting with Campbell in the
south of France in October 1932 and conclude with two pieces dating from shortly
after the poet's 1957 death. Also found here are a number of bibliographies and
reviews from the Ellsworth and Joan Mason collection of Roy Campbell.

Note: Following the Index of Correspondents there is additionally an Index of Titles
and First Lines. While this latter index is not exhaustive, it was believed that it
would help give a better idea of the contents of the exercise books which comprise a
large part of this collection. Many of the poems, essays, and other works by
Campbell found here in draft form are perhaps not well known nor yet, in many cases,
published.

The Art Collection holds, in the Olaf de Wet collection, a portrait head of Campbell
of painted plaster; in the Photography Collection are photographs of Roy and Mary
Campbell and their family, as well as of places associated with them.

Citations in the following index with two elements indicate box and folder numbers
(e.g. 2.9 is box 2, folder 9); those with three
elements indicate box, folder, and exercise book numbers (e.g. 1.9.2 is box 1, folder 9, exercise book 2).

Abridging distances that deviate ...--2.3.1Aeolian sisters, canvas clouded ...--2.2.31All About It--2.3.1All Lenin's comrades lurch and stagger ...--1.9.2The Art of Poetry--2.1.25The Art of Poetry, by Horace, translated by RC; 27 p. in exercise book--1.2Autobiography in Fifty Kicks (To A. F. Tschiffely); dated at end Collares,
1953 and with note to Tom Moult; 2 p. on one leaf--1.1Banderillas de Fuego!; on the translation of García Lorca poems; 4
p., marked for printer--1.1Between the lamplight and the flagon ...--1.10.12The Born Too Late--1.10.11Born Too Late (Archibald MacLeish)--1.10.12But hoopoe like my coat I'll trail ...--2.2.30Canaan; 1 p.--1.1Caramba!--1.10.13The Chanting Goshawk (To Carlos Riba)--2.1.21Choosing a Mast, The Swords, and This evening, where all lovely shapes grow
black ...; three handwritten poems on four leaves--1.1The chorus of the lesser stars--1.9.1[Collected Poems] In the first volume of these Collected Poems ...; various
drafts of preface--2.3.2[Collected Poems] Preface to volume two--2.3.3Colloquy of the Sphinx and the Soldier; 5 p.--1.1Come round be seated on your fannies ...--2.2.29[Dawn on the Sierra of Gredos] Daybreak on the Sierra--2.1.20The Dead Torero [and] To Peter Warlock; on a single sheet--1.1Dear Mr. Ciari [John Ciardi?]; draft letter in response to an article in The
Nation--2.1.22Dear Mr. Donald MacWhinnie, and your kind confrere ...--1.10.10Dear Mr. [Richard G.] Eberhart ...; draft letter--2.3.2Dedication to Mary Campbell; 9 p. typescript carbon--1.1[Dedication to Mary Campbell] Satire 1, Dedication to Mary Campbell (filed
with To the Springboks 1932)--2.9Diary of a trip to South Africa; about 20 p. in a May & Baker Ltd.
1954 Medical Diary--1.3Don John of Austria, generous son ...--2.3.3Drawings--1.4Driving Cattle to Casas Buenas--1.10.11Early Poems; handlist--1.10.11Easy to Locate (On Being Lionised by the Monkey Folk); multiple drafts--1.9.1Epilogue to Scharmel Iris's Spanish Earth; 4 p. in exercise books; about half
of published text--1.1Familiar Daemon; on verso of Song--2.9Fernando Pessoa; prose essay--1.10.14[Flowering Rifle] Preface, chiefly to Flowering Rifle--2.3.1For Violet Tschiffely--1.9.5From Orpheus (Part II), together with variant fifth stanza entitled Scars on
the Rump; 3 p.--1.5[Golden Shower] Preface ... of the Golden Shower; 3 p.--1.5[Golden Shower] Preface ... of the Golden Shower--2.3.1[Golden Shower] Preface ... of the Golden Shower--2.3.2[Golden Shower] Preface. For the recovery, from the Cape Town archives
...--2.3.4[Golden Shower] Preface. To my lifelong friend and benefactor C. J. Sibbett
... --2.3.4Grace After a Meal--2.1.20Gramercy!--see Homage to old EzraA Gust of the Mistral; essay-review of R. Aldington's Introduction to Mistral;
2 p.--1.5Here comes that Rocky Mountain fellow ...; 1 p.; unfinished--1.5Here in this land of Rhodes and Kruger ...; multiple drafts--1.10.10History looks the winner in the mouth ...--2.2.30Homage to the Great Ezra; satiric verse; 1 p. on card--1.5Homage to old Ezra; drafts of satiric verse with various titles including
Gramercy!--2.2.27The House of Bernarda Alba, by Federico García Lorca, translated by
RC; 87 p.--1.6How much of you, O salty sea, the tears of Portugal must be! ...--1.9.3I Ask Why Has It Dawned Another Day?; 1
p.--1.5I turn to vapour in the frantic strife ...--1.9.9In a divine ecstatic revelation ...--1.10.14In Darkness--1.9.1In his self-portrait in the nude ...; 1 p., unfinished--1.5In human history, and rightly so, the final word is with the knockout
blow...--2.2.30In Memoriam A. F. Tchiffely [sic]; accompanied by three unfinished drafts; 4
p.--1.5[In Memoriam A. F. Tschiffely] Cid Campeador; 1 p.--1.5[In Memoriam A. F. Tschiffely] El Mio Cid (In Memory of Aimé Felix
Tschiffely, Carried to His Grave on Horseback, Buenos Aires, 1953); accompanied
by a fragment and another draft with only the parenthetical phrase as title; 3
p.--1.5[In Memoriam A. F. Tschiffely] Don Amado Feliz Tschiffely's Last Ride-- 2.3.4[In Memoriam A. F. Tschiffely] The Last Ride of Don Amado--2.3.4[In Memoriam A. F. Tschiffely] To Aimé Felix Tschiffely (Carried to
His Grave on Horseback)--1.9.5[In Memoriam A. F. Tschiffely] Aimé Felix Tschiffely--1.10.19[In Memoriam A. F. Tschiffely] Empty Saddle (In Memoriam Aimé Felix
Tschiffely)--2.2.31[In Memoriam of Mosquito] In Memoriam
(Mosquito Lozoya ...)--1.10.11In our streets, when night falls ...--1.9.8Incertitude my only norm ...--1.10.12I've felt his feathers stirruping my ankle ...--2.1.21Lecture at Salamanca; in Spanish; 4 p.--1.5The Life and Work of A. F. Tchiffely [sic]; 23 p., lacking p. 9 and 11-13;
typescript carbon with handwritten revisions--1.7Life-insurance--2.1.26Life is a girl superbly built and kicking in your hold ...--2.3.3Life is a girl superbly built and kicking in your hold ...--2.2.31Lorca; about a quarter of the final book; includes three unpublished poems;
handwritten and typescript carbon--1.8The lynx, the lion, and the leopard ...; at head of title: Orpheus--2.3.1Manuscript notebooks; 31 exercise books--1.9-10, 2.1-2Mr. Spender said that the weakness of my poems was ...--1.9.6[Mithraic Emblems] Prologue to Mithraic Emblems (filed with To the Springboks
1932)--2.9The monstrous thing that at the verge of ocean lives ...--1.9.3A Munichite Remembers--1.10.13My dead want company. I'm next, I'll wager ...--1.9.8My dear friends; draft letter re RC's 36-year marriage--1.10.17My dear Peter ...; draft letter re Lorca translation project--1.10.15My dear Richard & Catha [Aldington]; draft letter--1.9.8My dearest Rob [Lyle]; draft letters--2.1.25My! It must be a lovely sight ...--1.10.11My it must be a lovely sight ...--1.10.12Newer poets in Spain ... [drafts of letters to the Times Literary Supplement
(and other journals?) concerning British reaction to]--2.1.23Newer poets in Spain ... [drafts of letters to the Times Literary Supplement
(and other journals?) concerning British reaction to]--2.2.27Newer Spanish poets ... [drafts of letters to the Times Literary Supplement
(and other journals?) concerning British reaction to]--1.10.19No more than one who waited ...--1.9.9Notebooks; 4 exercise books--2.3Now; first line: The rubbernecked, hell-ghosting ...--1.10.17Now; first line: While those of us by Tagus stray ...--2.2.30Now all those lewd babooneries are seen ...--2.2.30Now almond groves are fleeced in flying spray ...; 1 p.--1.5Of skilful toil. For long ago ...--1.10.13The Old Horse-breaker--1.9.8Olive Schreiner, Crusading Without a Cross; prose essay--1.9.9On a Nose (from Quevedo)--1.10.12On Being Asked by a Schoolboy Why I Wasn't Included in Mr. Wayward's Cassowary
Anthology; accompanied by a second unfinished draft; 2 p.--1.5 On Randall Jarrell in The New York Times--1.9.8On Robert Payne--1.9.7On Robert Payne in The New York Times--1.9.8One is One [by] P. D. Cummins; review by RC; 4 p.--1.5Orpheus--1.9.5Orpheus--1.10.17Orpheus--2.1.24[Orpheus] Where Sirius his loophole slashes ...--2.1.26[Orpheus] Alert to spell the dots and dashes where Sirius his loophole slashes
...--2.2.28[Orpheus] The roar of the collective stars destroyers of the blond guitars
...--2.2.28Orpheus; three variant drafts; 3 p.--1.5Other Works by the Author of This Book; handlist of RC's publications--1.9.2The Poems of St. John of the Cross, translated by RC; 41 p. in exercise
book--2.4Poetic workings, 1-3; 147 p. on 106 leaves--2.5-7Portuguese Poetry; unfinished draft essay--1.10.18Preceeded [sic] by a dozen fat poltroons ...--1.10.12Preface. I thank the editors of The Catacomb ...--1.9.6Prose fragments; 19 p.--2.8Renunciation; unfinished poem; 1 p.--1.5Renunciation (after ... Manuel Bandeira); some drafts entitled:
Resignation--2.1.26Resignation--see RenunciationThe River Duoro debouches at Porto ...; draft essay on Portugal--2.1.25Roman Lusitania--2.2.27[The Sailor-Girl] From the Spanish of Luis de Camoes; translated by RC; 2
p.--2.9Say if a painter were to choose to place upon a horse's neck a human face
...--2.2.296 Reales / Kilo--2.2.30A Simile from The Flaming Terrapin [and] Snapshot of Nairobi; on a single
sheet--2.9Sir, I knew one of the killers of the [Zulu] Prince Imperial ...; draft
letter--2.1.22Snapshot of Nairobi (filed with A Simile from The Flaming Terrapin)--2.9Some South African Writers [and] A South African Poet in Portugal; two scripts
for the South African Broadcasting Corporation, 1954; 13 p. carbons--2.9Song; on verso of Familiar Daemon; 2 p. on one leaf--2.9The Song Made by King Edward Himself; 2 p.; RC's note to Wilfred [Hanchant] on
p. 1--2.9Sooner than mechanised enslavement ...--2.1.20A South African Poet in Portugal (filed with Some South African Writers)--2.9Spooring an Angel--1.10.10The stars, like kisses, have devoured the night ...; 1 p.--2.9The Swords (filed with Choosing a Mast)--1.1T.W.A.; with unfinished fragment entitled Trans World Airlines--2.3.2Taurine Epistles; two copies with a few missing pages; one copy of typed
carbon copies (153 p.), other a typescript (152 p.); both with handwritten
revisions--2.10That fine Portuguese scholar, Aubrey Bell ...; draft essay on Portuguese
literature--2.2.29Then like when Saint Belmonte heard the trumpet ...--2.1.21This evening, where all lovely shapes grow black ... (filed with Choosing a
Mast)--1.1Through every glade and garden of your reign ...; 2 p. on one leaf--2.9To My Godson (Rob Lyle)--1.9.4To Peter Warlock (filed with The Dead Torero)--1.1To the Springboks 1932, Satire 1 Dedication to Mary Campbell, [and] Prologue
to Mithraic Emblems; three poems in typescript; 7 p.--2.9Toril; 2 p.--2.9Tragelaph and hippotragus, whom I graded as the Magus ...--1.9.9A Translation of Les Fleurs du Mal, by Baudelaire, translated by RC; 46 p. on
43 leaves; handwritten and typed--2.11Translator's introduction [to] four great Spanish dramatists ...--2.1.22The Trickster of Seville, by Tirso de Molina, translated by RC; 13 p.--2.12Trompasas a los Trampasos; Christmas verse for Peter, Christopher, and
Marjorie, incorporating Home to the Great Ezra; 2 p. on card--2.9[unidentified poems and poetic fragments]; 8 p.--1.1[unidentified prose work on poetry and history]; 2 p.--1.1[unidentified satirical fragment]; 1 p.--1.1[unidentified prose work dealing with the Spanish Civil War]; 1 p.--1.1Uys Krige, a Portrait; 6 p.; RC handwritten letter to my dear Uys
enclosed--2.9Verses Hidden in a Haversack--1.10.12Le Voyage; poetic workings in notebook with two other poems; 8 p. in exercise
book--2.9Warning--2.1.26The Water Melon--2.3.1When night falls in our streets there's such despair--1.9.7When on our streets night falls again ...; 1 p.--2.9When Rankin took Damascus (as you storm Parnassus) ...--1.9.4Which only those can weather who have known ...--1.10.16With semaphores grotesquely vain ...--2.3.1Wyndham Lewis; letterpress proof copy of suppressed edition; 54 p.--2.13